Posts Tagged ‘Brooklyn’

Portland, Oregon’s White Rainbow recently treated my home town of Brooklyn, NY to a slew of inspired live performances. This resulted in Escapades, a tape of long form live sets from various Kings County locales. The offerings differ in length and style, but each one is a true electronic adventure. The track posted below is from a loft party in early October. Its celebratory tone starts on a high note with some spoken word MCing. It unfolds into something that sounds like a secret jam between fax machines and printers who have been exposed to a healthy dose of Can. The result is ideal party music for humans. Despite being the shortest of the three featured on the album, this track creates a wondrous aesthetic space.

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Ask any 20-something indie rock lover in New York what they’re doing this weekend, and they’re bound to rattle off names of North Brooklyn concert venues that aren’t technically supposed to exist: Monster Island Basement, Secret Project Robot, Death by Audio, Silent Barn, Shea Stadium, Party Expo. Check the show recommendations in The Village Voice, The Times, and even The New Yorker, and you will discover these cartoonish monikers sprinkled alongside trusty Manhattan standbys like Bowery Ballroom and Webster Hall.

Semi-legal concert spaces in Williamsburg and Bushwick are evolving from niche attractions to popular above-ground destinations. And yet they seem to have everything working against them, aside from their underground cachét: no budget, no liquor licenses, NOISE, far-flung geographical locations, and the passionate belief that quality live music should be accessible to everyone — even those too young to drink. So how are New York’s DIY venues staying open, despite all the economic and legal obstacles?

Truth be told, not all of these venues do stay open. Market Hotel, a dilapidated old bank building in Bushwick that once attracted up to 600 concert-goers at a time, closed its doors to the public last April after being raided by cops two nights in a row. Over on the Williamsburg waterfront, Paris London West Nile shut down this summer when its landlords increased the rent; neighboring venue Glasslands, meanwhile, became so popular that its owners decided to purchase a liquor license, weed out minors at the door, and go legit.(more…)

If I didn’t count some of my closest friends in the Brooklyn band Behavior, didn’t know their music like the back of my hand, didn’t even have the pleasure of jamming with them from time to time, I would probably describe their first 7 inch with the following words, and leave it at that: “the “Good Behavior” 45 is two drop dead beautiful psychedelic pop songs from a band that poofed out of nowhere just yesterday, but that seems to already have achieved something of a devoted following in the smoggy North Brooklyn netherworld of legal and semi-legal concert dives.” It may seem a bit dishonest to write “music criticism” about a group that I personally hope to see go very, very far; but since I cannot erase this fact, I figure that doing so openly is hardly as dishonest as faking an absence of personal investment. Moreover, writing about your friends can make for a more three-dimensional picture of the subject at hand: If a 7 inch is kind of the aural equivalent of a snapshot, only someone who knows the photographed environment very well can point to what lies beyond the frame.